James Sweeney’s Twinless Is The Breakout Film Of 2025

I HAVE A RUNNING THEORY that most filmmakers do their best work starting out. There is something about audacity, candour and storytelling coming together in youth that becomes hard to replicate with time. For every contradicting opinion thrown my way, I will counter with Cooper Raiff (made Cha Cha Real Smooth at 25) and Xavier Dolan ( made Mommy at 25). James Sweeney joins this pantheon with Twinless. He is 35 but this hypothesis is hardly about age. It is about the gumption of finding your voice at a time when others are still in the process of borrowing and committing to it with an urgency that is both rare and precious. 

Twinless, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is Sweeney’s sophomore directorial outing but the assuredness on display is one for the ages. It is one of those clutter-breaking films that uplifts an otherwise long day and has a premise that will be a conversation starter for a while. This is both a prediction and a hope because it is already my favourite film of the year.

This makes me wary about revealing anything further. Disclosing details, I fear, might spoil the experience for others but like all great works Twinless is above petty plot twists as much as it is rooted in them. Written by Sweeney, the film has excellent narrative swerves and one of them made me audibly gasp in a crowd which comprised strangers. 

Two men meet at a bereavement group and form an unlikely relationship. At one level it suggests a solid bromance, which Sweeney commits to but it is also a marvel what he does with the premise. The filmmaker (he has acted in the film as well) designs Twinless as a raging dark comedy that represents introverts and their attachment issues with more lucidity than I have seen in years, and makes astute observations about relationships, masculinity, and grief with one unassuming question: how do you cope with the loss of a twin?

In his hands, this inquiry assumes existential multitudes with the idea of twinship doubling up as a stand-in — for soulmates, and the examination of one opening as an exposition of the other. Denis (Sweeney) and Roman (Dylan O'Brien in a career-defining turn) meet at a group where everyone has lost a twin. Roman’s brother Rocky died suddenly and he has been struggling since. As he keeps waking up from recurring nightmares and struggles to venture out alone without meeting sympathetic gazes from strangers, he dials up the funny stranger he had chanced upon. Denis readily agrees. 

What follows is both of them meeting every day (Twinless could be an excellent film about hanging out) and forging a friendship so codependent that, similar to Sweeney’s directorial debut, Straight Up (2019), it ends up challenging the conventional ideas and ideals of love. The film really shines here, making adequate provisions for grief and joy and reimagining them as a friendship exercise and not competitive sports. 

Roman likes to be with Denis because it reminds him of his brother. Rocky, like his new friend, was queer. Yet, the friendship benefits both. Denis too gains from it, not least a sense of companionship, and his deep investment forms the crux of the film and counts for spoilers. Twinless arrives at the reveal with ease, making a case for cleverness in a film stacked with clever decisions. It gets messy later but Sweeney navigates with humour and empathy in surprisingly equal measure. 

As Denis, Sweeney is hilarious and brings a sort of nervous energy that bounces off the bratty vibe of Roman. O'Brien is phenomenal as someone whose grief of losing his twin runs deeper than losing a brother. It pervades his sense of self. Since childhood, he has been a part of a set and now in the absence of the other, he wrestles with a fundamental query about himself. Who is he if not a twin? Who is he if not a brother? Twinless absorbs the anguish of this crisis and places it next to the crisis of losing a (prospective) soulmate, suggesting ever so lightly with humour and in good faith that it feels similar, if not the same. After all, what are soulmates if not twins we meet later in life?